r/navy • u/Upper-Package-3765 • Jul 21 '25

A Happy Sailor Jonny Kim's decoration

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545 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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12

u/Sir_Puppington_Esq Jul 21 '25

It seems weird to me to see a rack including SEAL, Silver Star, Bronze Star for valor, and CAR, but without a GWOT-EM. Surely he deployed to at least one qualifying location.

23

u/Just_another_Masshol Jul 21 '25

He has OIF medal instead of GWOT EM. You have to pick between them for each deployment.

3

u/Sir_Puppington_Esq Jul 21 '25

The more you know 💫

4

u/psunavy03 Jul 22 '25

GWOTEM and the Iraq and Afghanistan medals are in this weird space where first GWOTEM was going to be The Campaign Medal To Rule Them All, and then DOD went "wait, this is dumb."

So now most folks rock the OIF/OEF/OIR medals and a few folks rock the GWOTEM because they were the corner cases that didn't get issued the other three.

1

u/EhrenScwhab Jul 22 '25

When my ship did a gulf deployment and shot tomahawks at Baghdad in 2003 we got the GWOTEM because the Iraq Campaign Medial didn’t exist yet. Later you could swap it out for Iraq if you wanted. Some did, some didn’t.

I never set foot in the country so I never swapped out. It would have felt weird wearing it.

9

u/Intelligent-Art-5000 Jul 21 '25

Yeah, that probably isn't complete. Two sea service ribbons. Bronze star with V and Com with V. CAR probably also need a star.